


Does Roboppi Dream of Electric Sheep?

by cleanlittlesecret



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Found Family Dynamics, Gen, Post-Season 2, VRAINS Week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-25 21:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19754446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleanlittlesecret/pseuds/cleanlittlesecret
Summary: Hello, and from everyone at SOL Technologies, welcome to your new SOLtiS android!(Written for the prompt "androids.")





	Does Roboppi Dream of Electric Sheep?

_Hello, and from everyone at SOL Technologies, welcome to your new SOLtiS android! To begin, you may wish to give your SOLtiS a custom name and appearance. Each SOLtiS comes with its own settings, but you can change them to anything you want at any time._

The darkness coated his skin with stale heat as a barrage of new sensations devoured him, and he blinked, feeling the lenses that served for his eyes adjust. Across from him stood a row of shorter androids, all dressed in t-shirts and overalls, each face empty of features, and on either side of him the taller models waited to be sold in button-down shirts and jeans—a stock of cutting-edge dolls for the humans to play with. Ai slid his shoulders from the hooks that had held his new body on its feet, and when he called, his voice came out deeper and clearer than before, a speaker in his throat vibrating. “Roboppi?”

“Here I am, bro!” A short body lurched free to his right and stumbled with a yelp, almost faceplanting into an android from his row. “Woah, oh, oh—okay, I’m good!” Her voice had changed too, growing a little lower and harder than the gentle tone she’d used before, but when she jerked upright and saluted so hard she smacked her own forehead, the resulting squeak sounded familiar. “This is really different, huh?”

“Of course. Did you expect it to be the same as your old body?”

“No, but…ah!” Roboppi spun to trot down the lane with her arms held out for balance, hands skimming other androids as she swerved back and forth, and Ai followed with a frown.

“Where are you going? If we’re spotted—”

“Here!” Roboppi planted a hand onto a screen embedded in the end of the frame holding her model’s line. Her eyebrows furrowed as she hummed, and just as Ai was about to tell her not to strain herself, a tiny light above the screen flashed, and a video appeared. Roboppi’s smile reflected on the screen as she bounced on her toes. “I did it!”

“You _idiot_ ,” Ai snapped, jerking back from the camera, but the expected protest never came. Staring at her new self, Roboppi tilted her head and narrowed her eyes.

Activating his backup had uprooted her own code from her body, and when she’d later found Ai in the network, she’d been broken, her form flickering between the robot he’d known and something _else_. This new Roboppi looked like a child—almost convincingly human except for the slit pupils and the lights glowing on her throat, wrists, and elbows—and something about that unnerved him.

“Are you happy with this look?” Ai said, and Roboppi shook her head in a way he thought meant _no_ before realizing she was checking how her hair moved. “If you don’t like it, you can—”

“I _love_ it!” Her squeal echoed around the warehouse as Roboppi fluffed her hair with her fingers and bounced to face him. “You look great too, bro!”

“Oh, uh, thank you.” Ai preened, brushing back his bangs and tucking his hair behind his ear. It was all a projection, no more real than his old body had been when he’d stood on a Duel Disk screen, but ten years of technological advances gave the light a solid touch. “By the way, did you manage to hack that screen?”

Roboppi’s grin sharpened. “Yep! Got into the whole system actually, so I’ve already jammed all the cameras in here. No matter what they see, none of it will record until I clear them.”

Ai smirked. The little dummy still had some use after all. “Good job. Can you unlock the doors from here too?”

_Your SOLtiS is programmed to fill any role and complete any job, so it can easily be taught new tasks, but if you would prefer, you can instead bring it to your local SOL store and have one of our expert engineers reprogram it for you._

“Butterflies!” Roboppi darted after the colored wings fluttering around the park, but they avoided her easily, slipping past her fingers and soaring beyond her reach. After several failed attempts, she whined and stomped a foot in the grass, and Ai chuckled.

“Animals don’t like when you chase them, especially when you’re as big as you are now. If you stay still, then they might come to you.”

Roboppi tilted her head. “Still, huh…?” Straightening her body, she raised her arms and froze, holding the pose with unnatural stiffness like some kind of pastel scarecrow. At this time of day, the only other people in the park were adults with kids too young for school, but Ai could feel attention gathering on them like moths around a light.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting…for…them…to…come…to…me…” Roboppi’s mouth didn’t move with her words. “Please…be…still…bro…”

“I’ll give you some space then.” Shaking his head, Ai sat on a nearby bench. The few humans scattered around the park were shooting looks at Roboppi, and one young woman cautioned a toddler not to point, but nobody approached either of them, so as long as no one complained to the cops, they should be fine. Ai pulled his hair off his neck and closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of the light on his skin and listening to the sounds of human life around him.

Right now, Zaizen and the other people at SOL were probably working on a new way to make his existence hell. He didn’t have a clue what Hanoi would be doing, but it was nice to think that Revolver might’ve found some non-terrorist way to fill his days now that the Ignises posed little if any threat to the world. Takeru was most likely at school making up for the time he’d missed over the last decade, or maybe losing his partner had cut his ties to everyone else, and he’d gone home to his family and whatever life he’d had before—Ai wouldn’t blame him for it. Kusanagi would be working in his food truck and planning to visit his younger brother as soon as he could, the same as always, a reassuring constant.

Where was Yuusaku?

Despite how much time they’d spent together, Ai felt unsure, or maybe he knew Yuusaku too well to let himself simplify him like the others. Had Yuusaku gone to school that day, or was he staying home, running errands around the city, visiting the food truck? Did he get lonely in his now empty apartment, or did he like the silence? What did he think had become of Ai and Roboppi?

Opening his eyes, he glanced over to find butterflies crowning Roboppi’s head and lining her arms. Maybe they’d mistaken her light hair for a flower, or maybe they were confused by how she looked like a human but didn’t smell like one, but as he watched, she crept one slow baby step at a time until she stood before him, and while they swayed and fluttered, not a single butterfly left. “Look…bro…”

Ai chuckled. “Yeah, I see them.”

“Aren’t…they…beautiful…?”

_Your SOLtiS is built to handle any work you require, so it is much stronger and more resilient than it may appear. Please feel free to have it perform any kind of hard labor._

They were wandering a maze of narrow alleys when a small fuss caught their attention. A kid in a sailor uniform struggled with a coin purse in front of a vending machine, and when a yelp sounded just as something _pinged_ on the ground, Roboppi skipped ahead before Ai could stop her. “Can I help you?”

The kid flinched, and when Roboppi stared at her, she drew back. Given her age and how new the androids were, she may not have recognized them as robots by their lights, but plenty of little signs gave it away. Ai and Roboppi’s personal codes overwrote the AIs built into the androids’ hardware, so they had to go without the little programs meant to make them more human, and as a result, Roboppi’s movements were clumsy and nightmarishly jerky, and she often forgot to blink or move her mouth in time with her speech. Looking down, the kid sniffled. “I dropped some money, and it went under there—”

“Then I’ll get it!” Roboppi landed on her knees to reach under the vending machine, but when the space proved too narrow for even her small hand, she grabbed the edge and tilted the whole thing back, and Ai lunged to catch the machine before it could crash into the stone wall behind it. Unfazed by his reaction and the barely prevented disaster, Roboppi scooped up all the coins on the concrete and dropped them into the kid’s palm. “Here! Plus some extra!”

“Th-Thank you!” The kid glanced from Roboppi to Ai as he set the machine back in place. A smile tugged at her lips, but it vanished when Roboppi gave her a catlike grin.

“Let me show you something cool.” Roboppi touched the vending machine’s controls, and the lights for all the drinks flashed on. “See? Now you can pick whichever one you want.”

Ai opened his mouth but said nothing. Roboppi was acting so casual that it’d taken him a second to realize she was _stealing_ , something he’d never have expected from the robot who’d scolded him for being rude and promoting himself. The kid slowly glanced over the lights before pressing the button for a juice box, and when change rattled from the machine, Roboppi grabbed both drink and coins and pressed them into the kid’s hands.

“There you go! Is everything better now?”

“Y-Yes, um…thanks again…” Hugging everything to her chest, the kid scurried away, and when they were alone in the alley, Ai looked at Roboppi.

“What was that?”

“What do you mean?” Roboppi glanced up, eyebrows raised and smile dropped, and when Ai didn’t answer, she focused on the machine. “Does this thing have a camera too?”

She had to know—didn’t she? Roboppi had always seemed to have a strict moral code, but as he watched her examine the drinks, Ai saw it had been nothing more than programmed rules— _idiot_ was a bad word not because it could hurt someone, but because it had been forbidden, a taboo she had carried without understanding. She’d been quick to help the kid, so she must still care for others, but now she operated on her own rules.

_If you want something, then I will get it for you._ A clear statement, free of all the limits humans put on themselves and had once forced onto her. How far would she take that logic?

“Do you want anything, bro?” Roboppi looked at him with her hand hovering at the controls, but Ai took her wrist to pull her away.

“We’re not getting drinks here.”

“Aww!” For just a moment, she resisted—bracing her heels against the concrete—before allowing him to drag her stumbling along. “Why not?”

“I don’t know if we can drink anything in these bodies without frying them, and I don’t want to find out.”

“But, _brooo!_ ” Despite her whining, Roboppi fought no more as he led her down the alley, but Ai wouldn’t forget that glimpse of rebellion.

_Your SOLtiS comes equipped with a long battery life, but excessive activity can quickly drain it. Please keep an eye on the status of your SOLtiS, and if its energy runs low, then take it to its base so it can recharge._

A dull _thud_ jerked him around, voice inside him screaming to _run_ like he always had, but behind him Ai found not some dock worker or warehouse robot, but Roboppi, sitting on the ground in the fading light with her folded legs splayed on either side like a _W_ , her hands braced against the concrete, and her head down. “Roboppi?”

She let out a weird noise, bouncing and weak. “Sorry, bro. I’m stuck.”

An alarm jolting his system, Ai knelt to take her hands in his. “What do you mean? Are you hurt?”

The lights on her arms had dimmed, and when she raised her head to give him a sheepish grin, her eyes barely glinted against the darkness. The noise came out again, a strangled laugh. “No, no, I just ran out of power.”

“Out of power? Are you…” Ai squeezed her hands. No, no, _no_ —he’d already lost all the other Ignises, had put them down for his own selfish desire, so to lose Roboppi because he’d made her try out the new androids with him—

“I had to deal with this in my old body too. Robots run on batteries that have to be recharged eventually, so if we take this body back to the warehouse, we can probably find a way to charge it.”

…Oh. Ai blinked, struggling to make sense of what she’d said. _Batteries?_

“I think…” Roboppi tilted her head, then nodded. “Yep, this body has a sleep mode. That’ll keep it from going dead before we can get it on charge.”

Ai flinched at _dead_ , but okay, _sleep_ , he kind of got that—well, he didn’t understand too well, having been sleepy only once before, but he’d seen Yuusaku deal with it, usually by passing out in a chair. Okay. She would be okay. He would take her to the warehouse, and she would be okay. “Can you walk?”

Roboppi giggled and shook her head. “Not while I’m in sleep mode, duh.”

“Then I’ll carry you. It’s not that far.” They figured out together how to get her into position for a piggyback ride, but when he stood and felt how her bodyweight—definitely more than what would have been expected from a human her size—threatened to tip him onto his back, Ai huffed. “Geez, you’re heavy.”

“ _Ehhhhh?_ ” she said right into his ear. “Are you weak?”

His mouth twitched. “This burden is but a feather to the great Ai, so shut up and do that sleep thingy already.”

“Okay! See you later, bro.” Roboppi tightened her grip around his neck in a hug that would’ve choked a human, and her machinery quieted to a hum so faint even his sensors barely detected it this close. Ai walked, leaning to keep their balance as he navigated the docks.

_Bro…bro…bro…_

Ai didn’t remember when she’d started calling him that, _aniki_ , and he didn’t know if she meant it as a big brother or a gang leader. She’d been saying it on loop when she’d found him in the network, and the noise had identified her in a way her dissolving form could not. It was a term of endearment, a cry for attention, a plea for help, all at once—a constant reminder of what he’d done to her, how he’d made her _smarter._

He’d dangled the promise over her head to keep her loyal, trusting with her clean naivete that he would one day be as good as his word, but even after her prize had finally slipped from his fingers and fell into her open hands, Roboppi still followed him, still listened and obeyed. She would never be an Ignis, but she was an AI with free will, something he’d accidentally created, and he had no idea what she thought or what she would do. As he neared the warehouse where they would leave the androids and return to the network with their new forms, her weight lay heavy on his shoulders.

_Thank you, and please enjoy your new SOLtiS android!_


End file.
